American Airlines has been in the travel news a great deal recently, not so much for anything going on with their planes, but with how they want their flights booked. in this new AA world, booking travel will be more difficult for travel agents and may cost more for consumers.
In short, the airline is trying to reduce cost. It wants as many bookings as possible made through their own website or their “Direct Connect” system. As one part of the battle, in late 2010, American took all their flights out of Orbitz. The airlines is also currently suing Orbitz and their distributor Travelport, Ltd on anti-trust grounds.
And this week, a major GDS (Global Distribution System), Sabre Travel Network, which ironically used to be American Airlines’ reservation system, warned subscribers that the carrier had “threatened” some travel agents with a new fee of $5.50 per segment booked through any GDS.
According to Sabre, American cited their new “Content Commitment Policy,” which would give agencies the choice to book flights via their “Direct Connect,” or deal with less-than-full availability in the GDS and incur the new fee.”
American, of course, has a different take on the situation. They blame Sabre for increasing fees as a tactic to get American to drop their aggressive efforts to bypass GDSs. Plus, Sabre threatened to end their relationship this summer..
“Since Sabre announced in January that it intended to remove American’s fares from its system, our sales team has been visiting with our agency and corporate partners to inform them about options to continue to get American’s content, should Sabre or another GDS disrupt or remove it,” a spokesman said in an e-mail response.
“In addition, we’ve told agencies about how American will adjust our existing Source Premium Policy to accommodate expected changes in our GDS agreements later this summer.”
Now, most travelers may think, why do I care about all this (excuse the pun) “Sabre-rattling? Here’s an effort to translate the potential problems:
While booking directly on an airline’s website is good for the airline, it doesn’t give maximum choice to consumers. While some hard-core AAdvantage frequent fliers may only want to fly American, most travelers want at least the option of seeing what other flights are available out there.
Let’s look at Direct-Connect. For travel agents, using this proprietary AA system adds one more layer of complication to the whole flight booking process. Plus, it can cause all kinds of integration problems. Most agencies use a single GDS, which keeps all reservations accessible in one place.
This way it’s easy to give information and send itineraries to clients, and when one agent is out of the office, others can easily access the bookings. (Most travel agents and clients have at least one horror story when someone booked a reservation direct either by phone or online, and didn’t enter it anywhere a coworker could find the information.) Plus using the centralized GDS system means schedule changes and cancellations immediately appear in one place.
American is out front leading the airline pack on this direct-connect issue. Admittedly, the airline may save money but at the cost of easy comparison shopping and integrated back-office systems. If agencies ended up booking all airlines in separate systems, it would not only be a time-crunching logistical nightmare, it would make it more likely things will slip through the cracks. Time-sensitive information won’t get to clients in a timely manner. Plus the simple fact that the more times information gets transferred between people and between computer systems, the more chance there is that mistakes will happen.
My sense is that most agents will stay with the GDS system for the forseeable future, unless some amazing (and cheap) technology comes along to integrate bookings from different sources. But if American goes through with their threat and charges $5.50 a segment for a GDS booking, it’s hard to imagine that agencies can avoid passing that cost on to consumers.
The only thing for sure at this point, things are probably going to get a lot more heated until they get settled. Stay tuned.
Photo:©Leocha
Janice Hough is a California-based travel agent a travel blogger and a part-time comedy writer. A frequent flier herself, she’s been doing battle with airlines, hotels, and other travel companies for over three decades. Besides writing for Travelers United, Janice has a humor blog at Leftcoastsportsbabe.com (Warning, the political and sports humor therein does not represent the views of anyone but herself.)
